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Sunday, April 02, 2006

Second thoughts on the war.

Proponents of the invasion of Iraq have been having second thoughts of late. Not just second thoughts either. The pro-invasion crowd has seen some major defections to the other side.

And there are a good number of war supporters who are on the cusp of defection. One thing is clear a very large number of them are madly scurrying around to justify their decision. The view of many of them today is that the war was mistake but it sure seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

One of the better major publications in the world is the Economist from the UK. Its outgoing editor defended his support of the war saying: “I still think the decision was correct—based on the situation at that time, which is all it could have been based on. The risk of leaving Saddam in power was too high. Outside intervention in other countries’ affairs is difficult, practically, legally and morally. It should be done only in exceptional circumstances, and backed by exceptional efforts, Iraq qualified on the former. George Bush let us—and America—down on the latter. So, however, did other rich countries: whatever they thought of the invasion, they had a powerful interest in sorting out the aftermath. Most shirked it.”

He is not saying that the decision was correct based on what is known today. But he is saying it was correct based on what was known at the time. But I disagree. I try to keep up on current events and i certainly watched the news and read the newspapers at the time. And I thought the case against the war was clear. I watched Bush change his justification for the invasion over and over. It started out as somehow being linked to the 9/11 attack. But no connection was shown. It was asserted but the hard evidence was missing.

Then Bush argued that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Yet the evidence was missing again. Over and over the administration claimed it had evidence and what they presented fell far short of being convincing. A claim would be made, and usually, within days it would be debunked. And then Bush and crew would go running around looking for something else to justify a decision they had already made without evidence. That Bush had his mind made up seemed obvious at the time. And the evidence that he had no concern about evidence has continued to mount.

In the end the war crowd settled on bringing freedom to Iraq. Yet Mr. Bush knows nothing about freedom. And it is bizarre to think that he will bring freedom to another nation while doing so much to destroy it domestically. But this is the one claim that is impervious to evidence. He can assert that, in his heart, this is what he wanted to do. And unless he has written a statement somewhere saying that this is lie it would be hard to prove otherwise. But it is not hard to prove that this faux “freedom crusade” was bound to fail. Continued here....